here we are going; it can guide us when we wish to be guided; it can
save us, when we wish to be saved, from mistakes cruel to ourselves and
often far more cruel to other people.

For instance: it is very generally believed that the struggle for
continence is greatly eased by continual and even exhausting physical
activity. To work hard--to work even to exhaustion--is believed by some
to be a panacea. At our great public schools the craze for athleticism
is justified on the ground that, even at the expense of the things of the
mind, it does at least keep the boys from moral evil.

I believe this to be a mistake, and a mistake which is due to our looking
at sex from a too purely physical point of view. It is, of course, imbecile
to forget the physical, and deal with sex simply as a "sin"; but it is no
less stupid to forget that our bodies and souls are intimately bound
together, and that there is much more in passion than a merely physical
instinct. As a matter of fact, a tired person is not immune from
sex-hunger, and even an exhausted person is likely to find that, far from
sexual feeling being exhausted too, it turns out to be the only sensation
that will respond to stimulus at all. The exploitation of sexuality by our
theatres and Press is not successful only in the case of the idle and the
overfed; it finds its patrons also among those who are too tired to put
their minds into anything really interesting from an intellectual or
artistic point of view, but whose attention can be distracted and whose
interest held by a more or less open appeal to the primitive instincts of
sex. Tired people want to be amused and interested if possible; but they
are not easily amused by anything that appeals to the mind, because they
are tired. They want a sensation other than the customary one of fatigue,
and the easiest sensation to excite is a sexual one. They get it thinly
disguised, in a theatre or music-hall, more thickly disguised in the
form of cheap fiction, or quite undisguised elsewhere. But the idea that
sexuality is destroyed by fatigue is a very mischievous illusion which
has misled and helped to destroy some of the most honest strivers after
self-control. Such people will, with a touching belief in saws, seek to
find in exhaustion relief from temptation. But it is not amusing always
to feel tired. One desires at last something else--some other kind of
feeling--and one is too tired to make an effort. But sexual sensation i